5.14.2012

We know exactly where good intentions get a person! Here's a brief update of my life since conference

So #AOTA12 goes down in my book as being the best conference yet. I had a terrific time, enjoyed presenting, and LOVED meeting so many folks in the flesh. I returned and felt like I was hit by the mayhem hammer. It was as if 80% of the stress for my job had saved itself for the last 10% of the year. UGH.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my job, but the stress did get me down that first week back. Lots of meetings (many reeval-shares) and even some new additions to the caseload at this late date made organizing my schedule like completing a logic puzzle. (There are 4 Wednesdays this month, John Doe has to be seen 3x but there are 2 meetings on the opposite side of town and the other IEP team member is only free before 1230... etc )

I regained my footing, only to get completely schnockered. I thought I had a sinus infection, and then it seemed to be a teeth-only problem. I spent days with orajel and ibuprofen, got a very inconclusive diagnosis from my dentist, and really just have to wait out the pain. As soon as I start to feel any better in my mouth (9 days) I catch a cold. Ai ai ai. I am so sick of my puree/mechanical soft diet, and so sick of feeling lousy. /end rant.

I also took this past week to finalize preparations for the summer. I will be doing some prn work at a local hospital and I am also starting as an independent contractor with the state early intervention system. This has necessitated getting a second OT license, tons of paperwork, 2 more background checks, and essentially starting a small business. Some of that is exciting (PO Box! business cards!), some is tedious, but it's all finally done. (sidenote- remember how they have the scaled points for how stressful different life events are? Do you get cumulative points for repeated stressors? because from July to July, I will have worked at 5 different jobs. Not that I'm proud of that but can you understand the reason I feel a little insane?)

The school year is wrapping up, and I am sad about that. I have mixed feelings about returning to the hospital and essentially no time between the jobs to process this change. I will take a couple of weeks off (the beauty of prn work) to go to the beach and may get to do some reflection there, but I can't promise it will be work related. haha. I do have at least 7 entries started and hope to get some of those done soon, pending decreased pain and such. Hopefully this little hiatus has not scared off any new readers... this is why I use RSS for following blogs that I read, so I don't waste time checking for updates. All us blogger people need a break now and again ;)

5.06.2012

There is so much that I want to share and discuss about the 2012 AOTA Conference! This post is all about Twitter.

This statement may mark me as an old person to some people, and borderline crazy to others, but here we go: I remember when there was no twitter. And even then, when there was twitter, I had to post via text since I had a non-smart phone. In a very small, very unimportant claim, I remember being the only person to tweet during the AOTA conference. It was 2010, the hashtag was the incredibly formidable #AOTAconference2010 and I was very much tweeting to myself.

Wow, we have come so far, in such a short time!

2012 should be known as the year that social media came to conference in a BIG way. The sheer number of users has increased so much, and the willingness to use these tools in the midst of the conference has never been matched. I think that we were helped by having many of the OT4OT professionals present, and that the AOTA staff had a good online presence too.

The biggest boon was Karen Jacobs' Slagle lecture. Not only did she give the audience permission to tweet, she encouraged it, had her own live-tweeter, and brought her own hashtag. (wouldn't it be hilarious to be a time traveling OT and take that sentence back to AOTA 10 years ago? no one would have any idea what it meant!) Her message on promoting OT was excellent, and I hope someone recorded it so that it can be shown to students and practitioners everywhere. Interacting with others during the speech was really beneficial for remembering key ideas and getting great views on what was said.

I loved the tweeting from my co-presenters and our audience during our social media presentation. It was terrific to get a feeling of who was in the audience before actually meeting anyone. We were able to stream our presentation live and even got a tweet from an OT in England who was able to watch! Twitter was a great way to connect with the crowd and the world at large and hopefully it will start some new discussions about the future of the conference.

Twitter is an excellent tool for coordinating members of an event. It was great to meet and reconnect with so many of the online crew, and get real-time reactions to the events at hand. If you're not already on twitter, I would encourage you to start. Here was one good recent article about the value of twitter. Hit me up @otnotes and hopefully we can tweetup IRL at some point :)